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  • No Logo Legacy
  • Matthew P. McAllister (bio)

Naomi Klein, in her tour de force 2000 work, No Logo, self-reflexively places herself in much of the book—either in retrospect as a brand-obsessed teen or more affectingly as direct observer of sweatshops or culture-jamming initiatives. I hope, then, that in this spirit it's appropriate to begin this contribution to Classics Revisited with my own experience with the book. My work is quoted briefly, and then soundly criticized, in No Logo, as an example of overly reductionistic Marxist-doctrinaire antiadvertising perspectives. A friend of mine told me about this just after the book was published. Once I read the book myself, I was of course bummed, since the criticism was in such a clearly admirable work. But over the next year or two, many other friends as well as colleagues and students would e-mail or say to me, "Hey, you're in No Logo!" When I pointed out that it was not a favorable mention, they would say, "But you're in No Logo!" To be dissed in No Logo was in fact a career booster! It was an early hint to me of how widely read and admired Naomi Klein's work was.

By just about any measure, No Logo is one of the most influential critical engagements of corporate marketing, globalized production, and capitalist resistance of all time. It is an outstanding piece of both advocacy journalism and public scholarship. As an exposé about large-scale advertising, it takes its place next to such works as Stuart Chase's Tragedy of Waste (1929), Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957), and more recently Juliet Schor's Born to Buy (2004). As a spotlight on the cost-cutting production in, and social costs of, large-scale capitalism, it belongs to a class of muckraking eye-openers that includes Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any [End Page 287] Speed (1965), and—noting many of the same contemporary labor trends as Klein—Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001). As a best seller, No Logo attracted a wider readership than traditional academic books and helped reinforce a coalition of antibranding, antisweatshop activists. Klein herself has been described by the managing editor of the conservative Canadian newspaper the National Post as "the most successful author since Noam Chomsky popularizing leftist ideas in the post-Marxist age" (quoted in Austen, 2007), a description that the editor no doubt meant to be damning but what to progressives is a coveted badge of honor.

We should also recognize the impact of No Logo in academia. I recall discussing with a communications faculty member in the mid-1980s that there were virtually no undergraduate-friendly books taking a critical look at modern advertising to assign in classes. But No Logo was part of a group of books that helped change that by the end of the 1990s, with No Logo being arguably the most accessible (and certainly the best known). It has been assigned, in whole or in part, as required reading in numerous college classes. Excerpts have been reprinted in undergraduate readers. It was followed by a 2003 companion video—with updated material—produced by Sut Jhally's Media Education Foundation, similarly shown in numerous undergraduate courses. As of this writing, the various English-language editions of No Logo, as listed on Google Scholar, have been cited by other works more than three thousand times; the Spanish edition is cited more than two hundred times. No Logo has been a central part of, and influential on, an ever growing scholarly literature critically engaging the nature of consumer culture, corporate branding, and anticorporate marketing activism; just a couple of notable examples of this latter activist-oriented work include Inger Stole's historical work Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (2006) and Christine Harold's OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (2007), a complement to No Logo.

A work that combines critical ideas about advertising with incisive industry analysis, historical perspective, and first-person investigation, No Logo came at a key time in the history...

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